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2017 Mixpanel Product Benchmarks Report Sneak Peek

The 2017 Product Benchmarks Report comes out very soon. In it, you can find industry-by-industry benchmarks that will show how average and elite mobile apps perform in key areas of product health such as usage, retention, and conversion. In this sneak preview of the engagement section of the report, you can see how your app compares to the competition in terms of generating user activity on your app. To make sure you get the full report, just drop us your email here.

Where, how, and when are people using my product?

Engagement means action. It’s a new user signing up. It’s someone hitting play on a video. It’s every step they take, like looking at a shirt, adding it to the cart, removing it from the cart, adding it to the cart again, and finally buying it.

It’s how product managers can check the pulse of their product on a fundamental level. Where, how, and when are users engaging with their product? If a product manager doesn’t know the answers to these questions, they will soon be a former product manager.

Normalized Weekly Traffic

In this section of our 2017 Product Benchmarks Report, we look across four industries at weekly engagement patterns, the ratio of mobile to web engagement, and the way mobile and web engagement differ on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes the data validates long-held assumptions, and other times it surprises. It tells us the way millions of users interact with products at scale. How you use that to build better products is up to you. Companies often want to know when their users are most active or engaged. In this graph, “engagement” means the total number of actions users perform, and the graph shows how those actions are distributed throughout the week relative to the average day. It’s no shocker that weekend engagement is less than weekday engagement–but it’s not a bad thing when data validates our assumptions!

But there are a few subtler insights. Media & entertainment apps see the least falloff on the weekend. Here’s a theory on why that might be based on other data in the full report: media & entertainment’s highest overall ratio of mobile-to-web engagement and the moderate increase it sees in mobile engagement on the weekends combine to mitigate the overall engagement declines on the weekend. Basically: people goof off on their phones on the weekend.

And take note of finance’s Sunday engagement, the lowest in the set. As other data in the report will show, there’s more to financial apps’ Sunday users than this view might show.

How platform informs engagement

Mobile and web apps can have different use patterns that demand different products and strategies. These graphs show how engagement can vary by platform in SaaS and financial services apps. Understanding where your users are can be closely related to if they show up.

If you have a SaaS or financial services app and you’re trying to increase web engagement on the weekend, good luck to you because overall engagement plummets. In the SaaS web engagement graph, you can almost see employees losing enthusiasm as the work week progresses.

The same pattern appears in a less pronounced way with SaaS mobile apps, though mobile engagement is surprisingly steady throughout the week, including over the weekend.

The notable outlier in finance is Sunday’s mobile number, which is 21% higher than average. While Sunday numbers are for the most part below the weekly average, it would seem people like to get their books cooked via their phones before the work week starts.

Why cross-platform tracking matters

Tracking users across platforms is the only way to make sense of some these graphs. We can confirm some things we intuitively know: people will use “fun” apps (media & entertainment, eCommerce) on their phones at a higher rate relative to web than they will their “work” apps (Saas, finance). Mobile gets a higher share of weekend activity than it does of weekday activity. People do not use work apps on Friday.

But cross-platform tracking allows you to see deeper into the engagement data. You can see the way that while overall SaaS engagement is relatively flat during the work week, web engagement steadily declines. You can see the unusual way finance mobile engagement increases and web engagement decreases on Sundays. And you can see that a lot more mobile events are being tracked than web events overall.

Get the full Product Benchmarks Report

These engagement numbers are based on the millions of data points from thousands of customers. But there is a lot more in the full report including more engagement graphs as well as deep dives into usage, retention, and conversion, with metrics showing how both median and 90th percentile apps perform across industries, all designed to let you know exactly how your company stacks up.